Time for a Second Reformation by The Rev. Donald L. Hamer
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Trinity Episcopal Church / Grace Lutheran Church
Proper 26 / Reformation Sunday
October 30, 2016
Time for a Second Reformation?
The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, writes the Prophet Jeremiah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. . . he writes.
Jeremiah was looking ahead to a time when the exiled Israelites and Judahites would be returning from exile in Babylon. The northern and southern kingdoms – long divided and defeated one by one – would be reunited under this new covenant. The people of Israel broke the first covenant. They had already broken the Law they were given on multiple occasions in multiple ways – what would be different this time?
What is new here is not the giving of a law. What Jeremiah is proclaiming is a new dimension of the Law they had already been given. The first law given to Moses was written on tablets of stone; this new covenant is to be written on the very hearts of the Israelites. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. What will be different is the direct, personal relationship with God. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me.
Four hundred and ninety-nine years ago, Martin Luther had a similar revelation that changed his heart. It actually started over a single issue: The abuse by the Roman church of the power bestowed by Jesus to his disciples to forgive sins. In the 23rd chapter of the Gospel of John, verse 23, Jesus says to his disciples: Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained. Luther had already begun to have a crisis in faith with respect to the authority of the church to “forgive” sins. Sometime between 1512 and 1515, he had what is known as his “Tower Experience.” He had a sudden revelation that convinced him of what he came to understand as the essence of the Gospel, namely, that faith alone justifies the human soul without works, a belief that would become the cornerstone of his creed. Over time, he gradually came to question whether priests or the church had any function in the forgiveness of sins. The straw that broke the camel’s back came when the papal commissioner for indulgences himself was sent to Germany by the Pope to sell indulgences to raise money for the construction and restoration of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. And so it was that on October 31, 1517, Martin Luther wrote to his bishop what he intended as a scholarly piece entitled, “The Disputation of Doctor Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences” – what we know as the famous 95 Theses.
Although Luther’s intent wasn’t to start another branch of Christianity, that document is considered the birth of what became known as the Protestant Reformation – the anniversary that we observe this day. The historic inability of the Church of Rome to reform itself, and its refusal to do so in the face of Luther’s challenge – has led to a centuries-long standoff. We need not dig too deeply into church and secular history to be reminded of what ensued in subsequent centuries – the religious enmity between Protestants and Catholics that resulted in persecution, torture, discrimination and death. The history that the followers of Jesus have written for themselves and the world in the name of theological purity is far from the Gospel that our Lord and Savior actually taught and lived.
But do you see a pattern here? Jesus was a faithful Jew. The Jewish authorities weren’t open to his message which was the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies, but it was too radical a departure, to great a challenge to the authority and the power of the institution of the Temple. So Jesus was arrested, tried and crucified by those same authorities, and Christianity was born. More than 1500 years later, Martin Luther had his crisis of conscience and tried to draw the Roman Catholic hierarchy into a theological discourse to reform the Roman Church from within. Once again, the institution felt threatened, Luther was banned as a heretic, and the Protestant Reformation was born on Continental Europe. Less than two decades later, in 1534, the Church of England declared itself free from the Church of Rome—under what this Episcopalian must admit were theologically shakier terms than Luther raised.
But what has marked those 499 yearssince? Have Christians been successful in “purifying” the church? Have they been successful in unifying the Body of Christ? I don’t think so. In fact, we have just kept splitting up into tighter and tighter factions, so sure that we and we alone can discern and know the mind of Christ, so confident that our way of Christianity is the true way. The continental Reformation broke into Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Zwinglianism, and all of their progeny, including nationalized versions of each. The Church of England went through nearly a century of upheaval between the Roman and English church and then ultimately split into Anglicanism, Congregationalism and Methodism and their progeny. And all of this in the name of Jesus whose last prayer on earth was that we “all be
one” as He and the Father are one.
Let’s face it – struggling with a diversity of opinion has been part of the Christian tradition from the first century. The Council of Jerusalem – described in the Acts of the Apostles and reflected in the letter to the Galatians – was the first great theological divide among Jesus’ disciples. There, the earth shattering question was, Do gentiles have to become Jews before they can become Christians? That question was resolved when it was agreed that Jesus came for all humankind, as lived out in his radical welcome to all who came to him during his lifetime.
And now, as we enter the 500th year of the start of this great effort to reform Christianity, we read the news that Pope Francis will celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation by attending an ecumenical service in Sweden as a guest of the Lutheran church. In a highly symbolic act of reconciliation that would even recently have been unthinkable for a Catholic pontiff, Francis will visit the Swedish city of Lund tomorrow for a commemoration jointly organized by his own inter-faith agency and the Lutheran World Federation (LWF). The surprise move will see the head of the world's Catholics worship alongside the heirs to a religious tradition founded in opposition to the church of Rome and which once regarded the pope as the anti-Christ. In a joint statement, the two churches said the event would "highlight the solid ecumenical developments between Catholics and Lutherans."
What we are doing here this morning – what we did back on Pentecost Sunday at Trinity – is important and significant. Worshipping together as one body is a step – a small step, but it’s a step! – toward reclaiming the unity that Jesus exemplified in his life. I have been saying for a long time that the church of the 21st Century will look a lot more like the church of the 1st Century than the church of the 20th Century, and this morning we take one more step in that direction.
I believe this process of transformation is happening as we speak in what our Episcopal Presiding Bishop Michael Curry has called the new “Jesus Movement.” We are beginning to reclaim the single-minded focus on the life and teachings of Jesus as a guide to the way we live out our mission and ministries as faithful Christians, irrespective of denominational labels or congregational identities. And I’m talking about the things that Jesus actually said and did, not things that have been attributed to Jesus by his followers or practices that have grown up to support the institution. Nowhere in the Gospels do you ever see Jesus selling indulgences.
Phyllis Tickle, in her book The Great Emergence, talks about the need for today’s church to have a rummage sale so we can rid ourselves of all those practices, beliefs and ways of being that are accretions that the institutional church has taken on over the centuries but have virtually nothing to do with the things Jesus actually taught and did. It is time for us to realize that many of the questions that the institutional church has wrestled with over the centuries were more important to the maintenance of institutional power than they were to furthering God’s mission as embodied in Jesus of Nazareth. What are some of the questions we should be asking?
For decades congregations and church leadership have been asking, “How can we bring them in?” If people on the outside only knew how great we are and all of the wonderful things we do, they would come rushing in – and of course, bring their checkbooks. So how is that working for us? In the Jesus movement, we need instead to be asking the question, “Why do we bring them in?” and the secondary question, “How do we equip them in order for them to be sent back out?”
For centuries we have been clergy-centric, staff driven, and inwardly focused on life within our walls. Do you know, within 10 miles of our two churches, there are 21 different Episcopal churches? In the North Central region of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut (which runs roughly from Middletown to the Massachusetts border, from the Connecticut River to New Britain and the Farmington Valley), there are about 35 different Episcopal Churches, all struggling to figure out how their individual congregation can serve God’s mission in the 21st Century. In the Jesus Movement, we need to be asking, “What is our shared ministry? Who is already doing this work and how can we join in?”
Traditionally, congregations have always had a “strategic plan” and a “parish mission statement.” I believe that what Jesus is asking us is “How can we discern God’s mission in our context and then how do we participate in that mission as Jesus’ apostles?”
You know, when the Episcopal Church was going through its turmoil over gender-related issues and we had parishes wanting to leave and all that, one of our more conservative bishops addressed our diocesan convention and said, “You know, Paul teaches us that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ. Even when we can’t agree on anything else, we can always come together in serving God’s mission through Jesus example of service to others and in sharing the sacrament around the Lord’s table.”
I believe that as we enter into this 500th anniversary year of Martin Luther’s courageous act of challenging the powers of the Church of Rome, God is calling the Christian church as a whole to a second Reformation. This new reformation will be a time of reading and living the Gospel that Jesus of Nazareth actually taught and lived. With God’s help, it will be a time when Jesus’ followers focus on what they have in common rather than bickering over theological minutiae that Jesus never found important enough to teach.
In a few moments, before communion, we will pray in the words our Savior taught us, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven.” With open hearts and with God’s help, we can follow Jesus into a loving, liberating, and life-giving relationship with God and with each other that just might bring the Kingdom of God closer in this troubled world. AMEN.